A dream I had about the Northern Plains Arts Festival

G. Cournoyer

it was a white sheet spread across the floor. The artist had sanded down depressions at particular spots so the sheet could sag down beneath the floor’s level. The sheet was a map of the Dakota Territory (not the territory itself) spreading west to the Snake River and beyond. And each depressed area was red with pig’s blood at a spot on the map where Indian men, women, and children had been slaughtered in the name of the speckled cow and the ex-Confederate soldiers who rode around on horses before barbed wire came to be. The bigger the spot, the higher the number that had been murdered. The thought was maybe if the blood sunk in, the reality of what had been done here might, too. That MItakuye Okasin might come to be understood by even those who did not speak in the mother tongue.

The artist didn’t know what to do about the blankets that had the disease and that were distributed far and wide among the tribes when the cold set in. She just knew she needed to find a way, outside of paint, to connect.

I grieve that grief can teach me nothing

**a**

At the time poetry came to be about poetry, a self-consuming artifact, a battle was waged. Major figures looked left and right, and reached back blindly, trying to determine if some other’s mind had planted its flag in his or her ass, the better to be co-opted by.  

A school of thought circled around the idea that the luster of words codified in a given poem could be calculated.  This luster would not be relative, as is the case with stars whose prominence grows or dims with distance, but set out in indelible absolutes.  Luminosity and apparent magnitude.  Units of energy per unit time per unit area =– flux.  Measure the lamentation and perceived world-amplitude of a given poem, and then maybe its worth will be self-declaring.  This is empiricism, wounded. 

Another school - the garde that strove to be most avant - gave up on poetry and the finding of tomorrow’s past. They insisted on calling movies “film,” and smoked filterless cigarettes backwards before field stripping them. Because one never knew who might be watching or listening, now did one . . .This innovation eventually Ouroboros-ed itself with its own cleverness. For $50,000 you can have an Upstream Color.  And instead the founders worshipped old Saint Stan and the day-glo canon.  As though myopia was only for optimistic ophthalmologists among us, as though parasites don’t sometimes stop floundering and start taking over. 

Another school converted poetics into pragmatics.  The job of this poem is to be an anesthetizing light into the dark corners of brooding antipathy.  The job of this poem is to make you buy a yoga mat and an elective surgery or three.   The job of this poem is to inspire you to paint the light of your suburban woods with the tight sentimental platitudes of a septuagenarian Sappho from Maine.  The job of this poem is to give voice to the quiet desperation that stretches from the Upper East Side to the Lower East Side.  The job of this poem is to make the possible permissible. Let us fat all creatures else, and fat ourselves for maggots. 

**1**

In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, -- no more.  I cannot get it nearer to me.  If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave as it found me, -- neither better nor worse.  So it is with this calamity:  it does not touch me:  some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar.  It was caducuous.

[ . . . ]

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.

**2**

It’s no good trying to fool yourself about love.  You can’t fall into it like a soft job without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts.  If you can’t bear the thought of messing up your nice clean soul you better give up the whole idea of life, and become a saint.  Because you’ll never make it as a human being.   

**b**

                To watch a toddler toddle up to, and almost crash over, the cliff of a sidewalk’s curb, below which sits the hard dirty common street, gashed knees, and salty tears – (but no!) then veer off into the grass, at what passes for gallop and issue a squeal at the delight of being an embodied being that is becoming all the more itself with each passing day.

                To watch a hyena complain that the lion who got there first left slim pickings be watched by a vulture who will take as much as it can steal.

                Both/and, always, seemingly.

**3**

I was reading Kierkegaard and came across the phrase “To be purified is to will one thing.”  It made me sick.

**c**

                Sometimes life unfurls as though scripted by an evil French florist, as though your I being an other is not able to be encapsulated as a simile or a metaphor.  Don’t despair, but don’t be bashful in your sins or circumspect in your piety either.  The denouement may end up being governed by the ragged cirrhotic utterances of an old Southern playwright, a damsel dealing out distress.  Set the table for an opulent dinner and expect that the white linen table cloth will be crusty with wine and grease before the second cheese course is served and after the patrimony of the favored child is called into question.  Confiscate the aporia before the nuns in the wimples have their say.  Let the third act begin with a soliloquy from some place high and lonely and dark.  Remember that Rites of Spring caused a riot in its time, even if in ours it is but a segue to a public radio fund-a-thon.  Let Big Daddy be Big Daddy, and the gun-running rumhead a jamais jeune. 

Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est**

** Allegedly, “They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier"

Thinking is form, and eating is choice of embodiment. From another angle: it seems like if you take the trouble to know precisely where the food you consume comes from, and you know to the dollar precisely in what and in whom you invest when you purchase the food that you consume, you are acting as a political animal, in the classical sense. You have cornered the geography and economy of your fuel.

As the years accrete, the Tabasco sauce and the tart pectin are each relied upon with greater frequency. A dull palate is enacted celibacy; oatmeal each morning is a missionary position.

The Greeks considered it possible that Gods eat their children, while Abraham had absolute faith that his God called for his son to go under the knife. What formal conventions unspool from those conceptual possibilities?

While we are at it (and somewhat closer in history and lower on the human scale): How many died trying to capture the rage for sugar and tea? To feed the cotton gin and, decades on, the textile mills?

There are so many riddles to which I want answers from the universe, and so many answers only few of us could withstand.

“The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.” A murdered world is not merely metaphorical. Growing meat in the lab is a kind of metonym for our adulterating cleverness. Growing ears on a mouse – that too.

A known problem of discussions with a crazy person is the impulse – nay, need – to step within that person’s idiosyncratic crazy construct and sally forth from there, conversationally.   The talk can go sideways, in which no one gains or loses ground, or deeper into craziness, in which case you hope that  bread crumbs left in your wake aren’t gobbled up before you turn back.   Every once in awhile, if you’ve inhabited that autochthonic discourse for long enough, you start to feel like maybe you are in the process of pulling the person back with you, in fits and starts, more and less voluntarily.   Hopefully without any tricks or compulsion (that can more than backfire), except when you think you must be getting closer to the light and the surface, Demeter is nowhere to be seen.  And so but it’s also a known risk of having gone crazy that those who care for you will come into your crazy room and get stuck there with you, because their love compels them to try you to guide you out of yourself and back to yourself, both of which can be simultaneously and painfully true.  And it’s a known risk of loving someone whose craziness persists and mutates so that, having loved them for long enough, the idea of still loving them doesn’t seem so much a decision as a condition, not unlike Crohn’s or (a nightmare) Capgras syndrome.  You think readiness is all and ripeness is all and maybe you’re not sure which Shakespeare play this is, after all?

All of which makes the more empathetic souls among us cotton to an expansive notion of verisimilitude. 

Granularity Enhanced

*****

The observable universe is growing. Turns out that what we deemed to be the full sum of existence is less a function of what is and more a function of how powerful our measuring instruments - our capacity to calculate - becomes. If taken to be true at the level of physical phenomenon, might it not be true of . . . Jeez, I don’t know.

*****

It occurs to me that even the most placid of the angel-headed hipsters probably never quite squared up to the idea of atom bombs and the mutuality of assured destruction. Our legion of productivity hackers, I suppose, ought to spend a little time contemplating our epoch’s counterpoint - the specter of ecological collapse and a race to the bottom of a Hobbesian all against all. Capturing an increasing slice of libidinal attention – going all-in on the bid to get noticed and to become equipped with whatever type of cachet has the most cachet - is what an atomizing production function feels like, in this year of our Lord 2019. Then there is the question of meds, whether prescribed or a placebo or just out there in the ether, suffusing through our membranes. Balancing the amphetaminated ups and the depressant-aided downs, carving wide loping turns from serenity to mania to borderless vertigo.

Encyclopedic Appetites

Yes, I’ve read all 7 volumes, and yes, I buy into the hype. Thousands of pages of his work beyond that - yes that too. Somewhere between the 6th epitaph and the 4th story, there is a line about a grandfather in Omaha . . . Let me just give you the whole story, after the break:

Not many writers could convince a large, multinational publisher to go forth with a 680-page short-story collection about death, putrefaction, ghosts, and cancer, but [___________]’s career has never really cohered to any preexisting template.

. . . .

Along with the Internet and e-mail, [__________] also foregoes cell phones, credit-card use, checking accounts, and driving.

. . . .

After a career of hanging out with neo-Nazis, pursuing sex workers, doing drugs, dropping thousand-page books the way Updike dropped short stories, and being suspected of being the Unabomber, [__________], without even meaning to, had managed to cross the last line of decorum.  He had dared to abdicate his masculinity.

. . . .

[__________] tried to be characteristically charitable when imagining the FBI’s interest in him:  “One reason that the FBI thought I might be the Unabomber is that I believe probably the thing most likely to save us, and save the planet, would be a massive epidemic.  Because we can’t regulate ourselves.  If fifty percent or ninety percent of the humans died, maybe the rest would be better off.  Would I push the button to release the virus?  Probably not.”

 . . . .

“His books are too long in the way the Petronas Towers are too tall, the way foie gras is too rich:  the manner of their excess is central to their essence.

. . . .

In his own words:

“Have you ever wondered whether this world is wrong for you?  A death, a lover’s unabashed indifference, the sufferings of innocents and the absence of definitive answers – don’t these imply some hollowness or deficiency?  For my part, the wrongness struck when I was 4 years old.  I was at my grandmother’s house, and I saw a cat torture a baby bird.”

The ever-present autobiographical vignette:  when he was a child, he was charged with watching his 6 year old sister.  She was in the water.  And she didn’t make it out alive. 

All the World Is a Stage, and Performativity is All the Rage

                Outside the window men in yellow vests are constructing a building.   On the third story, the fluorescent pulse of an arc welder flashes with sparks dripping down multiple stories and bouncing off beams and the inner skeleton of the building.  A nuthatch tries to make it through the streaky office window.  It keeps flitting about and running straight on into the problem it doesn’t recognize to be a problem.

                It is possible that bombs will drop soon.   Bombs always seem to be dropping, but mostly on combatants and innocent civilians, not an apparatus of an organized, functional state.  That possibility has people’s attention.  That of-the-moment story will take priority over the concentration camps in which unwashed and unparented brown foreign children languish - that is a phenomenon about which very little will be said.  And none of that will touch how much attention we Americans will collectively pay to the various women from which the Bachelor has to choose. 

                And I am paying attention to the middle writings of a German iconoclast and the too-much-paint portraits of a London ascetic, with intermittent nods to the flashing moments of welded connection that the man across the way is bringing to life.  The bird is gone. 

The Good Doctor will see you now.

Quiddity Arrives at Midnight

Sometimes a person dies and all the air goes out of your lungs and the room and the world.  Other times the news hits and it’s like you already knew – that the day had been coming and it was just (as they say) a matter of time.  What is not a matter of time, though?  it strikes me to ask.  All matters eventually reduce to a matter of time.  But this isn’t about watches, minutes, and hours, or amor fati.   

It is about a drunk man, hired to take pictures of young boys who play baseball in primary-colored uniforms purchased by local business.  I did not know this man well, but enough to recognize him on sight.  Eventually.  And I heard about the incident years ago when he was unable to stand still long enough to look through the viewfinder of his camera. 

This is about the evaporation of embarrassment and the onset of premature spoliation.  About the dialing back of expectations until getting out of bed in the morning to consume enough booze to make the walk to the liquor store to buy enough booze to get you through the day and still have enough the next morning to do it all over again embodies aspiration itself.  The delamination of self is no easy thing to countenance. 

Suffice it to say that there exists a certain kind of conspiracy with the universe where self-destruction isn’t so much a byproduct of the underlying scheme, as its animating engine.   And the spectacle of public drunkenness – of holy fools who are not yet emancipated from their unholy demons – is always more than a trace element of that conspiracy. 

I admit to not knowing what to do with obituaries that read:  the end was near, and now it’s come.  But I know a sad clown when I see one.  Not to get all French modernist on you (e.g. "The stones striking the wooden coffin made that awesome sound which seems to us the reverberation of eternity."), but it should not be controversial to recognize that a pauper’s grave is but one instance of the way in which spiraling down becomes emptying out.  Nihil magis cavendum est senectute.  Or something like that.

Cui Bono

I belong to the school of watching people try to act naturally

And decided recently to incorporate trying to get noticed for good deeds

Into the curriculum to replace trying to get noticed for voluptuary consumption

And its predecessor, trying to traumatize banality for the giggles. 

A deadened mind is no more attractive than a cankered heart.

Put that in your casket and cremate it, kids.

You can sit at the edge of my mental furniture anytime.

It is capacious.  Just sit and cogitate. There might be some anxiety in

Falling off the perch, but mine as well become becalmed.  

Leaving your spot, if you coarse out and down to the diastolic pump,

For whom, would you say, does my blood most freely flow? 

Can empirical measures tell? 

The outer limits of self-fashioning have softer teeth than

the outer limits of accounting.   

I would rather swim in money than self-expression. 

Going green at the gills when the pump stops working, then go

Blue at the tempo of funereal decay, which – mutatis mutandis –

Decrescendos out of time and

Into charred black history. 

I belong to the school of capturing people trying to act naturally.

Play acting Goffman will not beautify

Any of the old anxious slogans or titillate

Any of the overdetermined overtures.

A grinning shark and vertigo comprises all of

what has been left over. 

Still, a cankered heart trumps a deadened mind trumps

A desiccated vestige of a constantly-evolving ideal. 

Say what you want about the virtuous lash, but

It leaves a mark.   It’s mine as well. 

Just try to stop me. 

Non Sequiturs: Faulty Openings to Never-Consummated Narratives

I.

Of all the splenetic yuppie gin joints to walk into, she had to walk into the one that sat just below the apartment that I had been renting, for however long it had been since I got the boot from the large Modernist house where my family and my former life and ½ of my considerable net worth still lived. Black pencil skirt and gray fitted jacket, unbuttoned with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, white blouse with a high neckline, encircled in a weird ruffle pattern, clicking and clacking across the bar room floor. I almost spit out my drink when I she sat down and I noticed she had a sidearm holstered inside the jacket. I knew I was going to jail, or to fall in love, and, at that moment at least, it didn’t matter which . . . .

II.

Rudy Petrochsky came to work the first day of his apprenticeship, having spent his mother’s meager savings on a large butcher’s knife and a thin white apron. He was 13, and often hungry. For the next three years, he worked on finding the right tendons in breaking cuts of meat that he ached to cook and consume. For the next ten years after that, he worked on finding the correct way to cut with and against the marbled grain of the meat, to use as much of it as could be used in correct proportions and with a felt sense of honoring what the word “meat” really meant. He began, on special nights, to take some of his work home with him and merge with it. For the last 10 years in the shop – during which time I was conceived and came into the world as his first-born son – my father began to travel out to the modest farms from which he sourced his meat. He deemed it the butcher’s prerogative to direct how the animals should be fatted in the weeks before slaughter. It was an auspicious time of his life, right before he came to realize that the increase in the amount of control he seemed to wield over his life and over the lives of those around him was not an incremental improvement on his lot in life, but an illusion the puncturing of which was going to be very painful indeed.

III.

By September’s third funeral, our man in Poughkeepsie began to try to take stock. John Black had been with the force for one-third of his life, detective for one-fifth. Walking up to the doors of strangers with news that was sure to rip a hole in their lives wasn’t getting easier, but it wasn’t getting harder, either. He came to see himself as a little bit of an enigma, which was far afield of what he knew himself, at heart, at be. The sense of foreboding had dissipated, sure, but increasingly he came to feel an affirmative thing going on to – like more than just familiarity at slipping into a role. Like he had been appointed to report to parents that sometimes being a stupid college kid with a penchant for experimentation was not a phase to age out of, but a fate to die into.

Sometimes a mistake was more than a lapse in judgment, even by someone whose station in life should have afforded at least that. Sometimes a mistake was the end, and it began to seem like that was so emblematic of what he knew to be true, that someone of his station – someone who had seen and heard what he had seen and heard – almost had an obligation – a calling, for shit’s sake – to continue be the bearer of the news.

IV.

As far as being a heretic goes, Sean Rafter was ahead of the curve. With a jailbird dad and a Stoly-saturated mom, he had essentially left to his own devices as soon as he graduated out of diapers. He ascended to the kind of freedom that other boys dreamed of, but would not have condoned if they felt its real heat. But he learned and he got on. By 13, he had grown tired of institutionalized culture and the bilious mass-marketed gruel that it offered, so he stopped going to school. By age 17, he had grown tired of the pre-packaged “rebellious” culture that was offered in its wake, which seemed like just a smaller tribe with more painfully acquired signals (the permanence of tattoos, the seeming permanence of withdrawal). So he stopped having the friends he had.

He kicked himself loose of context and, not knowing any better, he found that the best, most expressive thing he could do didn’t involve breaking the law, or sticking his middle finger in the air, or getting blotto for days at a time. The most militant form of resistance that he could find – and the antidote to the cold hand of fear that he felt gripping his heart at night – was actually something quite simple: red or blue or green paint, on a stretched out canvas, underwritten with belief.

The Flaying of Marsyas

                It took some of us decades to become comfortable in our skin.  Others knew, in the early haze of individuated consciousness, that such comfort would never be theirs to have.  Skin is the surface that can be skinned.  I cleave to my skin so it is not cleaved from me.  Acute proprioception comes and goes, and sometimes it’s like the world stops spinning or I start.  It was no accident that when Marsyas picked up the lyre, he got lost in the music he made with it.  Apollo wasn’t having it, as Apollo is wont to do.  And the response – why do you tear me from myself? – is what the sad young under-employed semioticians like to sit and ponder over, till the coffee grows cold and all the good drugs have wormed their way down to bedrock.  You don’t have to be 25 and stupefied, though, to trace that mercy-seeking plea across the play of surfaces.

Show Trials, Speak Memory

In a bewildered state approaching grace,

It came to me that being unchosen is not altogether different

And not altogether the same

As being abandoned. 

And then I came across a poem about boyhood, this poem, in fact

(how about that for instantiation?)

STILL LIFE

Boy with roof shingles
duct taped to shins and forearms
threading barbed wire through pant loops.

Boy with a safety pin-clasped
bath towel of a cape
tucking exacto knife into sock.

Boy with rocks. Boy
with a metal grate for a shield.
Boy with a guardian

daemon and flawless skin.
Boy in the shuttered district,
a factory of shattered vials,

green and brown glass.
Boy with a tiny voice
and crooked cursive handwriting,

with bent nails in a pouch,
metal flashing scavenged in bits,
with half a neck tie

tied around the brow
pushing a fire door wide.
Boy with a boy living

The boy in the boy’s head
watches sparse traffic
from a warehouse window

and takes notes on where
overpass paint hides rust,
where the cyan bubbles up

into a patchwork of pock
and crumbling disease,
a thief in the bridge’s body

he doesn’t see, but knows
is coming tomorrow
to swallow his song.

And I became less concerned, less anxious,

about the way in which choice and becoming lost

are wrapped in the tight space of unchosen abandonment. 

And then I think of Brodsky’s self-portrayal at age 40 and

How taking stock of boyhood and taking stock of age 40 are

Not altogether different and not altogether the same,

At least in this bewildered state of grace

With which I’ve been afflicted.

The Quiet Kind of Extravagance

[Come to accept the idea of a future that is exploring us and we can give ourselves, again and again, the possibility of remembering the future.   L. Berio.]

I once knew a sniper with a pink teddy bear tattoo on his left arm.   He told me he and every other Marine in his unit got the same one.  It was intended to provoke smart-ass comments, which is to say it was intended to provoke violence.   

When we met he was out of the military and no longer left targets in a lifeless crumple beneath a pink mist. He still killed animals, of all persuasions, and found it a moral imperative to eat as much of what he killed as possible.  Once the sniper feted me with bear stew, simmered in mushrooms and red-wine sauce.  It gave me claustrophobic dreams, like I had to dig myself out of a collapsed cave.    

I never saw him fight – never saw him drink either.   He told me he had to quit both or else end up dead.  In the winter we would stack square bales on a wheelbarrow and walk out to the pasture to disperse it in piles for the horses.  Without fail he stacked two seventy-pound bales in his right hand and a third in his left. 

Sometimes he needed a warm body to help with a project.  I remember one time he held a piece of four-inch polyurethane plumbing that was plugged full of human shit, while I took a Dewalt cordless sawz-all and sliced through it, expecting each moment to splatter us both with excrement.  That didn’t happen.  We patched in a new section, with ample amounts of diaphanous violet epoxy glue – enough to leave me cross-eyed.  The rich people whose shit had plugged the pipe complained about the smell.  We hated them, each for our own reasons, but we got paid in full.  I came away from the experience with a newly-felt but abiding sense of limitation. 

Where id was, ego shall be. 

Ontological precarity

Yes, yes, yes, all is suffering. We know. We read that book, too. We ratified the notion, acknowledged what it warrants. A quorum was present and everything.

And it’s not as if we don’t know the answer to the question: where to begin? Right here, right now, as each beat of a heart carries us forward in its staccato murmuring.

But how ? How to begin? So much depends on no ideas but in things, so much of the ballet between self-awareness and acknowledgment of consensual reality takes place off-stage.

That’s probably as good as it gets, the most that can be hoped for. The lash - yes, yes, yes, we welcome it, clear-eyed and with gratitude. That’s how.